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More killings than any other year

The county recorded 29 homicides in 2006, including one that was 19 years in the making.

By THOMAS LAKE
Published January 1, 2007

It was the year of the violent death, the year of the murder, the year when a hungry landscaper took a stolen shotgun to a Girl Scout campground and tried to roast a woodpecker.

Mariesa Weber disappeared last year. She was found 12 days later, in her debris-filled bedroom in New Port Richey, in the house where her parents and sister lived, where she'd been all along, dead and decomposing after somehow falling behind a bookcase.

The story rode the wires to more than 200 media outlets, putting New Port Richey in the national spotlight for at least the second time in 2006. The New York Times came calling in March after two people were stabbed - one of them fatally - and blame fell on a neo-Nazi wearing a gas mask.

The neo-Nazis lived on Teak Street, a few yards from the crime scene, and they flew red flags marked with swastikas. They were at war with their neighbor, Patricia Wells, who had frequent visits from a black man. An intruder entered the Wells home one night, stabbing her in the hands and face, killing 17-year-old Kristofer King. A young neo-Nazi named John Ditullio was indicted seven months later on a charge of first-degree murder.

King's was the seventh homicide in Pasco County last year. There would be 22 by summer's end and 29 by the end of the year. No one can remember a year with more killings. No one can say why.

There were seven homicides in July alone, including two double murders.

Two men turned up dead on a road in Hudson on July 10, raked with handgun fire. The authorities said they'd been shot by Christopher Cheatham, a cocaine dealer with a history of violence, after one of them questioned his sexuality.

Seventeen days later, Wesley Chapel teenagers Derek Pieper and Raymond Veluz were found dead on a dirt road near Trilby. They were shot execution-style. Their killer has not been arrested.

Then came November, with three murder-suicides in four weeks - two of them in one day. On Nov. 29 in Dade City, authorities said, Nicholas Claffey killed his former girlfriend Christine Bartlett with a knife and then shot himself in the head. A few hours later in New Port Richey, Walter Sweschnikow shot Frank Jordan, a friend who was bringing him food, and then turned the gun on himself. His motive was a mystery.

Meanwhile, the strangest murder case of the year began its crawl through the court system.

The case dates back to 1986, when a baby named Christina Wells was violently shaken by her parents. They were convicted of child abuse. She grew up brain-damaged. After she died in March at age 19 and a medical examiner declared her death a homicide, the Pasco County Sheriff's Office announced its investigators would see if they could prove her death was caused by the injuries she received as an infant.

It was, according to an Oct. 24 indictment that charged her father, Christopher Wells, with first-degree murder. Her mother, Tina Marie Wells, was not charged. At last check she was living in Georgia with her other children. Prosecutors couldn't remember a murder case with so many years between injury and death.

Thomas Lake can be reached at tlake@sptimes.com or 1-800-333-7505, ext. 6245.

[Last modified December 31, 2006, 21:46:23]